Tech talks up on tariff tit-for-tat

With help from Nancy Scola, Ashley Gold, John Hendel and Margaret Harding McGill

TECH TALKS UP ON TARIFF TIT-FOR-TAT — The office of the U.S. Trade Representative kicks off a pair of public hearings this morning on its proposal to impose a 25 percent tariff on roughly $16 billion worth of Chinese goods, including various tech-related items. “The proposed tariffs are part of the U.S. response to China’s unfair trade practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation,” USTR said in a statement released Monday. Trade groups representing top tech companies, which have long registered their opposition to President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, are poised to publicly push back on the measure over the course of the meetings today and Wednesday.

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— Unconducive: The Semiconductor Industry Association said in comments submitted ahead of the hearings that the tariffs will “undermine U.S. technological leadership, cost jobs, and adversely impact U.S. consumers of semiconductor products and the U.S. semiconductor producers.” SIA, which represents manufacturers and designers like Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Micron, has cautioned that the Trump administration’s proposed levies on Chinese semiconductors will backfire and harm U.S. chipmakers, many of whom export goods to China for testing and packaging before they are imported back into the States. SIA’s vice president of government affairs, David Isaacs, will be at the hearing this afternoon.

— Eye on Beijing: Anxieties over further escalation remain high. “China is clearly willing and able to respond with retaliatory tariffs,” the Information Technology Industry Council, which also reps semiconductor heavyweights like Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm and Micron, said in its submitted remarks. And the uncertainty over how China will respond is already “jeopardizing steady and strong growth of U.S. jobs,” ITI wrote. The group, which will be represented at today’s hearing by Executive Vice President of Policy Josh Kallmer, added that the “the continued escalation of tariffs … accelerates harm to all American consumers, workers, and businesses — both large and small — with no end in sight.”

NDAA PASS FOR ZTE A-OKAY WITH GOP — Republican lawmakers said the decision to strip harsh sanctions against Chinese telecom giant ZTE from defense authorization legislation (the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA) likely won’t doom the bill, John reports for Pro. “The House, the Senate and the president are all happy,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), one of the key figures in the negotiations, said Monday. Democrats and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida slammed the move to drop stricter language that the Senate version of the bill had included, but other potential defectors signaled they will accept the change.

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO MORNING TECH, where your host will never get sick of some good ol’ alliteration. Got any tech or telecom tips? Drop me a line at clima@politico.com or @viaCristiano. Don’t forget to follow us @MorningTech. And catch the rest of the team’s contact info after Quick Downloads.

FACEBOOK AD WATCH: TIM RYAN ON THE ROAD WITH RO KHANNA — Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) telling people he'll make make a run for the White House in 2020, the Intercept reports. If his Facebook ads are anything to go on, the Ohio Democrat seems to be trying to build a national profile by pushing to revive the Rust Belt via Silicon Valley. The footage in the ads, retrieved from Facebook's new political ad archive, is from a winter bus tour featuring Bay Area congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and more than a dozen VCs. Khanna is mostly silent, beyond praising a new 3D-printing plant and joking about Ryan's reaction to a vegan donut. But his presence sends a clear message. Confronted by the forces of automation and globalization, says Ryan, cities like Youngstown, Flint and South Bend are "saying, 'We want to be in the game, we want to fight, we want to win — and we need some help'" from the country’s tech industry, so much of which is concentrated in Khanna's district.

— MT readers know this wasn't Khanna's first spin through Appalachia. He got rock-star treatment during a March 2017 visit to a coding program in eastern Kentucky.

— The bigger political picture: Not for nothing are the two House Democrats already known to be chasing the White House — Ryan and Maryland’s John Delaney — focused on helping middle America navigate the effects of automation. It's forward-looking, even optimistic outreach to some of the same “left behind” voters who turned out for Trump in 2016.

THAT’S META: FACEBOOK ADS ABOUT FACEBOOK: Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who is eyeing the House speakership and campaigning for re-election this fall, has been running paid advertisements on Facebook since last week — all about liberal bias and censorship on platforms like Facebook. A search for Kevin McCarthy on the Facebook ad archive lists six ads that started running July 17, linking to an online petition for supporters of the cause. (More on the conservative motivations behind the claims of censorship at the hands of tech giants here.)

— “The Silicon Valley social media elite are trying to silence our conservative voices online — stand up to this liberal bias by ADDING YOUR NAME below,” one reads. The ads are paid for by Kevin McCarthy for Congress, and they are all similar, costing anywhere from less than $100 to $5,000, targeted at an older (45-65+) audience.

TRUMP’S ANTITRUST TURNAROUND — Just four days after bashing European Union officials for hitting Google with a record $5 billion antitrust fine, Trump hammered the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post and suggested the outlet serves as “protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought” against Amazon, another tech heavyweight. It marked only the second time Trump has tweeted about “antitrust” or “anti-trust,” with the first coming in May as he reasserted his administration’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner merger. More notably, it underscores an erratic pattern on market competition by the president and his agencies, which in recent weeks have re-upped their challenge to the AT&T-Time Warner deal, sent Sinclair Broadcast Group’s acquisition of Tribune Media to its likely demise and greenlit Disney’s bid to acquire much of 21st Century Fox.

FOUR TELECOM BILLS SAIL THROUGH HOUSE — Four pieces of telecom-focused legislation passed the House by generous margins on Monday. In the afternoon, lawmakers passed by voice votes the PIRATE Act, H.R. 5709 (115), which would boost penalties for unlicensed radio broadcasters, and the ACCESS BROADBAND Act, H.R. 3994 (115), which would create an internet connectivity office within the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. In roll call votes Monday night, lawmakers passed by 378-4 the Precision Agriculture Connectivity Act, H.R. 4881 (115), which would force the FCC and Department of Agriculture to assemble a task force looking at precision agriculture’s broadband needs, and by 379-1 the National Suicide Hotline Improvement Act, H.R. 2345 (115), mandating a study on creating an emergency dialing code for suicide prevention.

WELL, THIS IS AWKWARD — A fixed wireless broadband provider from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s hometown of Parsons, Kan., is among the 182 companies pushing back on the FCC’s approach to a valuable swath of mid-band airwaves. Wave Wireless — which Pai said serves his parents in a tweet last year — and its fellow companies, mostly small rural providers, want the FCC to preserve smaller geographic license sizes in the 3.5 GHz spectrum band. The agency is mulling rule changes for the band. National carriers want larger geographic license sizes, but fixed wireless broadband providers say licenses that are bigger than census tracts are not viable for their businesses.

— “Without census-tract-sized licenses, we will have virtually no ability to acquire protected spectrum in this band,” the providers wrote in a letter Monday. “That would be an intolerable outcome that would harm our rural broadband businesses and inhibit our ability to grow, but worse it would harm the millions of consumers for whom mid-band spectrum is the key to high-speed fixed broadband access.”

UBER WHISTLEBLOWER NYT-BOUND — Susan Fowler Rigetti, the former Uber engineer whose viral blog post on sexual harassment rocked the company and helped usher the #MeToo reckoning into Silicon Valley, is joining The New York Times as a technology editor for the op-ed section. Earlier this month the Times also announced it was adding Recode’s Kara Swisher to its opinion roster. “There are no two Silicon Valley warriors I’d rather have on our team,” Pulitzer Prize-winner and Times columnist Maureen Dowd tweeted Monday after the announcement.

TRANSITIONS

— Brian Weiss, a former associate administrator in the Office of Communications and Public Liaison at the U.S. Small Business Administration, joined USTelecom as its vice president of media affairs on July 23.

— There goes my side hustle: New Jersery Reps. Bill Pascrell and Frank Pallone called on FTC Chairman Joe Simons to “act against deceptive and unfair practices” in the live event ticket industry in a letter released Monday.

— Om nom nom: BSA | The Software Alliance and the Information Technology Industry Council urged Senate leaders to confirm three nominations to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) in a letter sent Monday.

CORRECTION: The July 23 edition of Morning Tech incorrectly stated the scale of Google’s lobbying spending in the second quarter. It was the company’s second highest quarterly lobbying spend.

About The Author : Cristiano Lima

Cristiano M. Lima is a technology reporter and the author of the Morning Tech newsletter. Prior, he worked as a breaking news reporter for POLITICO, covering the White House, Congress, the media industry and public policy. Cristiano first joined POLITICO as a senior web producer in 2016, managing social media accounts, producing content for the web, covering breaking news, contributing to the Morning Media and California Playbook newsletters and serving stints as a web editor.

A Brazilian-American journalist, Cristiano previously worked as a TV producer and reporter for Al Jazeera and Pennsylvania's WFMZ, a radio host for local NPR-affiliate WDIY and an intern for various other outlets. He's a two-time graduate of Lehigh University, earning both a Master's in 2016 as a Community Fellow and a Bachelor's in 2013 in politics and policy.